9 comments on “Obsession”

  1. Available in original 1959 (Revolution), 1961 (Playa Giron), 1962 (Missle Crisis), or 1963 (JFK Assasination) vintage…

  3. No, Stephen, I’m not actually that interested in Cuba. All I’ve done is respond to you guys. In fact, my side has never initiated any back and forth in this debate. It always starts from Kent’s press releases. I respond to it because it’s propaganda and I’m offended at the distortions of the truth coming from Kent, Marquardt, etc. They really are obsessed with this Cuba thing – it’s all they write about. If it were another issue and I found the same kind of obsession and distortion coming from them, then that’s what I would be responding to, rather than Cuba.

  4. “All I’ve done is respond to you guys.” That is kind of the way it is for me too. I first became involved on this issue after attending the Cuba panel at the ALA conference in San Francisco, in which three of the four speakers spent most of their time attacking Robert Kent and the fourth speaker talked of travel options to Cuba. I was struck by how one-sided this panel was. In the years since then, my comments have been mostly in response to people from your side defending the Cuban government or attacking its critics.

    Distortions come from both side of this issue. Yesterday I received a hostile email from someone who claimed I was Robert Kent’s handler. This was in response to my criticism of an article she wrote that was forwarded by Rosa Baez.

    As to obsession, focusing one’s efforts on human rights conditions in a particular country is not really an obesssion, at least no more than those who focus their efforts on defending such regimes. People choose different causes in their lives, to me it is good that some specialize on a particular issue.

  5. Stephen,

    I’m aware that there have been programs from SRRT folks in response to Kent et al. What I have to emphasize about them is that they wouldn’t have taken place were it not for Kent’s campaign. Robert Kent is devoted to the Cuba issue. Steve Marquardt has been a prominent person in librarianship on other issues prior to now, but now he also seems obsessionally focused on Cuba. I think of you as someone who is focused on debating perceived socialists in librarianship as an anti-communist liberal, especially regarding international issues. I don’t see you as focused on Cuba, personally. It seems to me that you deal with it to the extent that you do because the Left is often defending Cuba (to an extent) in this debate. So it doesn’t surprise me that you see our side as obsessed with Cuba as well. But we wouldn’t be addressing Cuba if it were not for Kent’s and then Marquardt’s campaign.

    As for me personally, I think you can see from the record of my posts here and in the earlier Library Juice that Cuba is not one of my primary interests.

  6. Rory, I believe you do a disservice to some of your colleagues who are about as focused on Cuba as Robert Kent or Steve Marquardt. I don’t think that choosing to focus one’s time, either professionally or voluntarily, on a particular cause, which may involve a particular country, to be an obsession, at least not an unhealthy one. I chose many years ago to focus my spare time on the issue of human rights in Vietnam. Within Amnesty International USA I am the Vietnam country specialist, and AIUSA has country specialists for almost every country in the world. When I come home from work on Fridays, I see an ever increasing number of people marching for human rights in Tibet. Within the academic world, there are area specialists who focus their work on a particular country or geographic region, and academic organizations are formed on this basis.

    Steve Marquardt, as I understand, chose on his retirement to focus his time on the issue of the independent library movement in Cuba, and one of his primary efforts is to organize letter-writing campaigns on behalf of various Cubans imprisoned on this basis (about whom the ALA is deeply concerned). Helping people in prison, whether in Cuba or elsewhere, seems like honorable and important work to me.

  7. Steve,

    I don’t think there is anyone on my side of the issue who has such a singular focus on it as Kent and Marquardt do. If it appears that way to you, I think it’s only because of your relative lack of interest in the other things that they wright about. Rhonda Neugebauer does write about it more than about a lot of things, and as you suggest, that is because she is a Latin American area bibliographer.

    I agree that there’s nothing wrong with being focused on an issue. However, I think that if someone is going to devote their life to an issue, they ought to see the complexities of that issue enough not to treat it in black and white terms, as both Kent and Marquardt do. To ignore the shades of gray, the nuances, the complexities, and the diplomatic realities when the issue is one’s sole focus in life does to me suggest obsession rather than a healthy interest.

  8. Comment by Rory Litwin — August 6, 2008: “…I’m offended at the distortions of the truth coming from Kent, Marquardt, etc.”

    REPLY: Rory, please let me know where I have distorted the truth. On my Google Groups resource page, I’ve made every effort to supply factual information, often referencing primary documentation. There is only one humor or opinion piece there, about the right wing tendencies of the ALA left, and even that is based upon behavior actually observed in the course of this controversy.

    Comment by Rory Litwin — August 7, 2008: “I don’t think there is anyone on my side of the issue who has such a singular focus on it as Kent and Marquardt do.”

    REPLY: Ann Sparanese is the most well-informed of the pro-imprisonment group, in my opinion. Her postings on this subject are chocked full of facts.

    Comment by Rory Litwin — August 7, 2008: “I agree that there’s nothing wrong with being focused on an issue. However, I think that if someone is going to devote their life to an issue, they ought to see the complexities of that issue enough not to treat it in black and white terms, as both Kent and Marquardt do. To ignore the shades of gray, the nuances, the complexities, and the diplomatic realities when the issue is one’s sole focus in life does to me suggest obsession rather than a healthy interest.”

    REPLY: My life also has a focus on other human rights issues, in my role as Amnesty International Legislative Coordinator for Minnesota, which in recent months has addressed women’s rights, Darfur torture, closing the Guantanamo detention facility, and requesting signatures on Congressional “Dear Colleague” letters on various other issues or abuses. All this plus the Cuba concern I find this to be a greatly rewarding activity, as has been expressed from a Cuban prison by Hector Palacios Ruiz in a letter to his wife: “(F)ighting for what is just is the only way to experience happiness.”

    On your second point, Rory, having read three dozen books on Cuban history, politics and culture, I’m fully aware of the complexities, realities, and difficult history of relations between the USA and Cuba. See my chronicle of these events on my Cuba451Letters web page: http://groups.google.com/group/Cuba451Letters/web/history-of-u-s-interference-in-cuba. As a human rights activist and as a librarian, however, I do believe that neither this history nor these “complexities” justify the burning of entire library collections, as was ordered by several of the Cuban provincial courts, on the grounds of the “subversive” content of books “lacking usefulness.” Managers of the American Library Association’s “Book Burning in the 21st Century” web page must feel otherwise, however, because repeated requests and the provision of independent legitimate reports documenting these incinerations have not broken the consistent silence about these Cuban crimes against books and intellectual freedom.

  9. You distort the facts by repeating at face value the claim that these dissidents are “librarians” and that their tiny book collections are “libraries,” which is language that is applied to them purely for propagandistic reasons.

    I’m too tired of this debate to continue. You won’t convince me of your cause, and I think that the profession as a whole is equally worn out and permanently decided. I suggest that you move on to another topic.

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